Mikel Rouse: Music for Minorities - Saturday

Mikel Rouse

(New York, NY)
Presented by Playhouse Square

Described as “a composer many believe to be the best of his generation” by the New York Times, composer and performer Mikel Rouse illuminates the stage with his mesmerizing solo work, “Music for Minorities” – an integration of film, music, and performance, that offers a completely new approach to storytelling in the media age.

About Music for Minorities

For the last fifteen years, composer and performer Mikel Rouse has been developing a technically and thematically adventurous trilogy of acclaimed multimedia operas that have played in theatres and festivals around the world. But Rouse doesn’t only think big: he’s also been able to operate on a more intimate scale as a solo recording artist and live performer, traversing the United States like a 21st Century Mark Twain with a surreally beautiful song-and-video storytelling piece called “Music For Minorities.”

Originally commissioned by UCLA Live, “Music For Minorities” was shaped, sonically and conceptually, by the time Rouse spent in rural Northern Louisiana at a college artist-in-residence program. Unlike his grand opera compositions, the songs in “Music For Minorities” have a gentler, folk-ish quality, and the arrangements are more traditional, with just the slightest hint of blues. A soundscape of percussion and multiple guitars are the prerecorded accompaniment to a live performance that incorporates stories, interviews and songs as a musical underscore to synchronized video.

On the visual side “Music For Minorities” mixes talking heads from rural Louisiana (some sporting accents so thick they need subtitles) along with snippets of Manhattanites enlisted from Rouse’s own circle of friends and colleagues. With a style the composer likens to “romantic channel surfing,” the video footage coasts through a series of these stories and chronicles, the focus drifting fluidly from one story to another with barely any closure. The rhythm of subjects’ dialogue is edited into a kind of music, and the subjects’ images become visual poetry. The seemingly unrelated video images merge to create a common thread: the views of the Silent Minority.

Described as “a composer many believe to be the best of his generation” by the New York Times, Rouse likens the integration of film, music, and performance in “Music For Minorities” to creating “an illustration of memory.” Throughout his 60-minute set, Rouse illuminates the stage with his mesmerizing performance, creating an elaborate, textured showpiece from the delicate art of storytelling, and an intimate-yet-epic theater experience the audience won’t soon forget.

About Mikel Rouse

Mikel Rouse was born in 1957 in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute and the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.  Rouse moved to New York City in 1979, where he studied African and other World Musics and began his study of the Schillinger Method of Composition. Upon moving to New York, Mr. Rouse formed his contemporary chamber ensemble, Mikel Rouse Broken Consort. With Broken Consort, Rouse produced numerous recordings including “A Walk In The Woods” (1985), which appeared on The New York Times list of the "Ten Best Records of 1985"; and “Against All Flags” (1988), which was The New York Times "Pop Album of the Week" upon release. In 1995, Rouse premiered and directed the first opera in a trilogy of modern operas: “Failing Kansas,” inspired by Truman Capote's “In Cold Blood.” This led to an emerging art form he calls "counterpoetry," which involves the use of multiple unpitched voices in counterpoint. In 1996 Mr. Rouse premiered and directed the second modern opera installment, “Dennis Cleveland,” at The Kitchen in New York. “Dennis Cleveland” was hailed by The Village Voice as "the most exciting and innovative new opera since Einstein on the Beach".  In 1998, the Brooklyn Academy of Music commissioned the third opera of his trilogy, “The End Of Cinematics,” which premiered in Fall 2005.  In 2005 he released “Music for Minorities,” completed in 2003. A mini-concert of songs and original film from “Music for Minorities” was presented September 2003 at the McGlohon Theatre at Spirit Square in Charlotte, NC. The completed piece toured the US and Pacific Rim in 2005-2006, with commissioning support from UCLA Live. “Music For Minorities” premiered on March 4, 2005 at On the Boards, Seattle WA. A new piece commissioned by The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the John Cage Trust and Betty Freeman premiered at The Joyce Theater, NYC in October 2006. The piece was scored for multiple iPods set to "shuffle" so that each audience member had a different realization of the score. The music for the piece, “International Cloud Atlas,” was released exclusively on iTunes and was available for download prior to the premiere. This prolific artist's compositions have been performed throughout the United States, Europe and the Pacific Rim. His work has been presented at major festivals, including the Bang On A Can Festival in New York City, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Perth International Arts Festival, the Eclectic Orange Festival in California, the New Zealand Festival in Wellington, and the Melbourne International Arts Festival.  Mr. Rouse has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Edward F. Albee Fellowship, the New York State Council on the Arts, and ASCAP Awards. He has thrice been nominated for the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts. Mikel Rouse currently resides in New York City.

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